TAGS:
Surface Design
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Dyeing Fabric
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Fabric Painting
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Art Quilts

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., a day when we gather with family and friends, stuff ourselves with traditional foods (or their vegetarian, gluten-free, low-sodium versions), and reflect on what we are thankful for. Some of us also watch football. Our entire Quilting Arts family feels especially...

Surface design on textile art refers to changing the look of fabric through techniques such as low-water immersion dyeing, batik, and discharge dyeing (or removing the color from the fabric), or stamping, stenciling, and printing. "Sunrise Serenade" by Diane Rusin Doran. This quilt appears...

I'm at International Quilt Market and Festival in Houston this week, soaking up all the fabric, quilting, and surface design ideas I can and meeting up with old and new fiber art friends. The only downside is that it's a little like walking into the world's best bakery when you're on...

If you've never hand-dyed fabric before, the process can seem intimidating. Yet learning how to dye fabric is not that different from learning how to cook. If you follow the recipe and take simple safety precautions, you will almost always end up with a feast of delicious color. Sue Bleiweiss shows...

What are your favorite color combinations for quilt art and surface design ? I particularly love the combination of hot pink with orange and turquoise. Or red, yellow, and orange together. And then there are the sun-washed combinations of yellow, blue, and green. Two sets of 'recognizable pures.'...

Whenever a new batch of commercial fabric samples arrives in our offices, everyone gathers around to ooh, aah, and dream about how they would use this or that pattern to make a quilt, bag, accessory, or baby item. I'm always first in line to see what's new, hungrily eyeing every stack of new...

Where I live in New England, it gets dark at about 4:30 p.m. in the depths of winter. So when Daylight Savings Time kicks in and the snowbanks start to melt, I'm itching to get outside and do some fabric painting and dyeing. Sun printing with stencils. (Photo by Pokey Bolton.) I have always admired...

Recently, I shared Marcia Derse's tips for making your own fabric stamps for resist dyeing . The way that Marcia came to surface design and incorporates fabric painting and dyeing techniques into her quilt art fascinates me so much, I thought I'd give you some insight into her thought process...

Art quilting can be an expensive hobby. A good-quality sewing machine, specialty threads, and stacks and stacks of fat quarters, are just the beginning. It always seems like there's some new gadget, tool, or surface-design supply I absolutely must have. But I come from thrifty New England stock,...

I just love the Fall. If I had my way, it would always be Fall. Perhaps I'm so enamored because I grew up in San Diego, where Fall is more a designation of time than an actual season, and now the beauty of the New England Fall has enchanted me. Maybe it's because I love the feel of the cool,...

I have taken many classes from fiber artist Rayna Gillman. I love her warm, giving approach to teaching and I have acquired many skills from her lessons. The results of Rayna Gillman's "therapy sewing" using many fabrics she made more interesting with Thermofax screen printing . But maybe...

Note from Vivika: This is the fourth in a series of blog posts by Candy Glendening showing you how to create unique functional pieces with artistic flair. Be sure to check out her Quilting Arts Workshop video tutorials, Free-Motion Machine Sketching and Dyeing to Stitch . Now that you've dyed a spectacular...

One of the things I'm looking most forward to as editor of Quilting Arts Magazine is learning more about surface design . Surface design fabrics by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer. Techniques like fabric painting, dyeing, printing on fabric, and foiling are all familiar to me and I admire other artists'...

The Quilting Arts/Cloth Paper Scissors crew and my quilt full of surface-design love. On this Thanksgiving Day I am in transition. I'm settling into my new Houston digs in preparation for my fresh adventure with Quilts Inc. while still consulting for Quilting Arts and preparing for the next season...

From inspiration, to design, to finished piece, there are certainly times when working on an art quilt can be a challenge. Luckily the kind of challenge I'm referring to today is the fun kind: a Quilting Arts Reader Challenge. There have been quite a few reader challenges this year at Quilting Arts...